List Segmentation 101

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Introduction

While it’s very easy to make money in email marketing, it’s even easier when you know exactly how to take advantage of powerful tools that will instantly bolster your ability to make money with your emails (and these are the same tools that are used by the most successful email marketers).

With just one powerful technique, you’ll be able to maximize the value of every email you deliver, while making sure that your email open rates and click-through rates instantly soar!
You see, in order to build a successful mailing list, you need to be able to send the right emails to the right people. It’s like ‘match-up’ where you are able to send highly tailored emails to people who have indicated that they are most interested in certain topics.

And when it comes to maximizing your email marketing profits, the only way you can do that is by knowing your audience. It’s important in every aspect of business, but never as important as it is in email marketing because with so many spam filters and easy “opt out” options, you need to make sure that you are creating the kind of emails that your subscribers want and are ultimately going to respond to.

Fail to do this and your email campaigns will never be profitable.

This is where “list segmentation” comes into play and it’s a tremendously valuable tool at boosting the value of every subscriber, even if you have a very small mailing list!

You see, list segmentation is about a lot more than just booting out deadbeat subscribers and sending messages to your most active buyers. It can also help with everything from crafting carefully customized emails that are targeted to boost the response rates right down to targeting specific groups of people with tailored offers and promotions that will yield the highest response possible.
By segmenting your lists, you are no longer shooting in the dark. You aren’t fumbling through a mailing list blindly trying to feel your way around, making countless errors along the way.

With list segmentation, you’re making the job much easier while boosting the value of every campaign. You are getting to know your audience, and delivering exactly what they want most.

So, where do you begin? How can you learn the powerful tactics to effectively segmenting your mailing list for maximum profits and visibility?

In this special report, you’re going to discover the most effective methods to segmenting your lists right from day 1 (starting with your very first subscriber), and if you’ve already built up a mailing list I’ll show you exactly how to maximize the value of existing subscribers while skyrocketing your income with high-response campaigns and well-received broadcasts.

And through the process not only will you be able to make more money from every email you send out, but you’ll also learn to understand your audience better and to really connect with your target market.

After all, the easiest way to build successful products and campaigns is by knowing the customers that they are being marketed to.

So let’s get started!

Uncovering High Value Customers

One of the most important things that list segmentation can do is help you identify your very best customers – in other words, those who buy most often, spend the most money, and are most responsive to your broadcasts and messages.

It’s always important to reward those who buy from you regularly and who have proven to be loyal customers. By identifying who on your list spends the most money, you’ll be able to offer them rewards and incentives, discounts, etc. that other list members don’t receive. In other words, you are making them feel appreciated just for being loyal and in turn, they will continue to do so.

For example, you could segment your list so that anyone who spent at least $100 in the last year would be included in a specific broadcast. Those people might then receive a 50% discount coupon on your newest product (or some other limited & exclusive offer), and you could specifically tell those buyers the coupon is only for your “best customers”. That would make them feel like they made the right decision spending their money with you while making some extra money from the sale!

Your best customers should always be treated like kings. This is a very easy way to make sure you are doing that. By sending them regular thank you gifts and letting them know they are receiving these “exclusive offers” because they bought something recently or they read your emails often, it will make them even more likely to buy from you and read your emails in the future.

In addition to spoiling your best customers, you may also want to create special products or private deals specifically for them that you wouldn’t otherwise offer. Perhaps something like a one-on-one mentoring course, private discount on training, or a product that is highly limited in sales that only your “best customers” get a chance to purchase. This is another way to ensure they stay happy and keep buying from you!

Deadbeat Subscribers

Another great way to segment lists is by determining who on your list is a deadbeat subscriber. What exactly is a deadbeat subscriber, you might ask?

A deadbeat subscriber is someone who has demonstrated a total lack of interest. He or she has not made a purchase from you, he/she rarely (or never) opens your emails, he/she has not responded to any of your free offers, etc. In other words, he/she may as well not be on your list at all. They are completely unresponsive.

You may wonder why you should even bother segmenting these people. After all, they aren’t hurting anything, right?

Well, yes and no. The fact is, subscribers cost money. Most email service providers’ charge you based on how many subscribers you have. Let’s say every 1,000 members costs an extra $5 per month. Having an extra 20,000 deadbeat subscribers on your list would cost you $100 per month! That’s no small chunk of change, especially when it’s all for nothing. These people will never respond to your offers, they simply aren’t interested – and so they should be quickly removed from your list.

But before you zap them forever there is something you could do as a “last resort effort” to ensure that they are not interested in your offers.
Send the “deadbeat” group a message by segmenting who hasn’t responded to offers in the past and notify them that they will be removed in the future.

That message could be a simply warning that he/she could be removed from your list and miss valuable offers because they haven’t demonstrated interest. Your message could also include be some kind of incentive such as, “Hey {NAME}, I noticed you haven’t bought anything through my newsletter in a while, so I thought I’d take the time to offer you this 50% off coupon.”

This could turn deadbeats into valuable list members, or at the very least, save you some money by purging them.

Using Segmentation Features

There are many different ways to segment your lists so that you’re able to “divide and conquer” your subscribers while being able to better understand what they are most interested in.

Different methods of list segmentation will be more effective than others depending on what your qualifiers are. For example, age segmentation would more valuable and important to someone marketing to seniors or college students than to someone selling weight loss products.

It’s up to you to decide which segmentations will work best for your subscriber list, but it’s important to always test different types of filters so that you can begin to group subscribers based on the demographics that make it easier for you to target.

Here are some various types of segmentation you might want to use, and a little bit of information about why each one could be useful:

Gender – Segmenting by gender could be extremely useful if your products are mostly useful or of interest to one gender. It can also be helpful if you have a different version of your products for different genders, or if you want to promote gender-specific affiliate products. Additionally, it could be helpful if you promote a product that might offend or alienate one gender.

Age – Age segmentation is especially useful if you’re marketing to a very specific age-related group. For example, if you’re marketing to high school or college students or seniors, you might want to segment your list according to age.

Employment Status – Segmenting by employment status is especially useful if you sell products geared toward business and employment. For example, you might want to send emails about a resume-writing guide to those who are currently unemployed.

Geographic Location – Segmenting by location can be beneficial if you have different versions of your product for different languages. It could also be very important if your product only applies to people who live in a certain area, or is more beneficial to people who live in certain places.

Purchase History – Purchase history is one of the most useful segmentation types, because it can let you know if a subscriber is a “deadbeat” or not. A deadbeat subscriber is someone who has not made a purchase from you within a specific length of time. You can either remove those people from your lists, or you can tailor your promotions specifically to them in order to potentially increase response.

Purchases – You can also segment by what they purchased, how much they spend, how often they bought from you, etc. By segmenting this way, you can send certain promotions to people who spend the most or least, those who buy rarely or often, or those who buy specific items.

Relationship Status – If you sell products that relate to dating or relationships, this type of segmentation could be extremely vital. For example, you might not want to send an ad for “how to get your ex back” to someone who is married, because it might damage their current relationship if their partner sees it and thinks they’ve requested the information. And if someone is single, they probably won’t be interested in a product about how to keep a marriage happy.

Abandoned Shopping Carts – If your list works with your ecommerce system, you may even be able to segment your list according to people who have abandoned their purchases. It’s been discovered that up to half of all ecommerce transactions are abandoned before the sale is completed. If you segment these people, you can send them a message tailored to asking them why they abandoned their purchase and what you can do to get them to complete it.

Read History – If you segment your list according to who actually opens your emails and reads them most often, you can reward those who loyally open your messages most often with special incentives. Then you can tell those who rarely read your messages what they’re missing out on by not reading them!

As you segment your lists, remember that these factors can change. You probably won’t have a way to allow your subscribers to update their information in your system, so someone who is single when they subscribe could get married, and someone who is unemployed when they subscribe could get a job.

Still, segmentation is extremely useful in many ways. It will allow you all kinds of ways to improve your list’s responsiveness, from sending the right messages to the right people, to removing deadbeats and tailoring messages to specific groups.

Maximizing Response Rates

There are many ways to get more from your list, including increasing open/read rates, increasing sales, etc. In this section, you’ll learn some valuable ways to increase the overall profitability and responsiveness of your list.

A/B Split Testing

One thing most people neglect to do is to use A/B split testing to find out which offers generate the best response and gain the most exposure so you can duplicate it again in the future. Part of segmentation is splitting people into multiple groups in order to test various offers and ad types.

Some email services have this testing built right into their system. In this case, it’s very easy to use split testing in order to find out which version of a message or offer gets the best response.

If you don’t have this option built in, you can use a separate split testing software and simply segment your list and send one version out to each segment.

Changing your Offers & Messages

If your messages aren’t getting a good response in general, you may want to tweak your offers and messages to get a better response. Split testing will help you figure out which versions perform best, but how you change your messages or offers is purely up to you.

If people aren’t opening your messages often, you should work on your subjects. Don’t use anything that could be misleading, such as “You’ve received a payment”, or “Personal message from me.” This will upset people and you’re likely to see your unsubscribe rates shoot through the roof.

Instead, use subjects that are intriguing enough on their own to get people to open your message without resorting to anything misleading.

Mailing More or Less Often

How often you mail is often as important as what you mail when it comes to getting people to open and read your messages. If you don’t mail often enough, people will forget who you are or that they opted in to receive your messages. If you mail too often, people will get upset, tune you out, unsubscribe, or even start reporting your messages as spam.

Finding a good balance may be tricky, but as a rule, you should never mail more often than every couple of days unless a major promotion is going on, and even then don’t mail more than once per day.

Ideally, you don’t want to go longer than a week or two without mailing your list, either. You want to keep them “warmed up”.

Offering More Incentives

The more often you give your subscribers special incentives, the more often they will open, read and respond to your emails. They will even come to look forward to your messages, because they’ll know they could be getting something special anytime they do.

Here are some ideas for incentives:

Deep discounts on your products

Free reports, videos, or other freebies

Articles, tips and advice

Offers only for list members (not the general public)

Holding Contests

One great way to get more people to read your emails is to hold regular contests in which you give away prizes. You can send out emails to announce the contest, remind people of contest deadlines, update the contest, and announce winners.

Some things you could give away:

Discount codes for your products

Free copies of your products

Gift cards to popular online merchants

You can also add a social element to your contests. You can give subscribers additional entries into the contest if they share a link to the contest via Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Each share gets them additional entries.

Ask What Subscribers Want

One quick and easy way to get a boost from your subscribers is to outright ask them what they’re looking for. You can set up a survey at a place like SurveyMonkey.com to ask subscribers what they are looking for. This could be questions about what type of training they are seeking, what format they want things in, etc.

Here are some survey ideas:

What kind of training or help do you need?

Do you prefer video or written training?

How much would you pay for this?

What is the most difficult thing you struggle with in (niche)?

Customize Messages

There are endless ways to customize your email messages in order to increase response, but the sad fact is that many people neglect to use even the simplest customization or personalization.

Most people know how to insert the subscriber’s name into the body of their email, but did you know you can also typically insert their name into the subject, as well? That grabs a lot of attention quickly.

Boosting Profits With Follow Ups

There is another very important reason why segmenting your lists directly impacts sales and overall profits. By being able to target specific buyer groups you can reach out with a series or “product related” services and offers including:

Offer support and “extended licensing” on specific products.

Obtain valuable feedback and reviews for specific products.

Follow up with additional “upgrades relevant to the product.

Offer auxiliary components that enhance existing products.

Promote similar products and make money in affiliate marketing.

And much more… all just by knowing who bought what.
By carefully segmenting your mailing lists, you will be able to create additional offers designed only for those who have already purchased from you as well, while working towards developing a relationship with new subscribers and prospects that have yet to make a purchase or respond to an offer.
Segmentation enables you to connect with your subscribers and know exactly where people are in your sales funnel.
– Who has yet to respond to an offer?
– Who has yet to purchase a product from you?
– Who just recently purchased from you?
– Who may need a bit of help deciding which product to buy?
– How many times has a subscriber clicked an offer but never purchased?
For example, you could create a number of auxiliary components that compliment your main service or product, further extending your upsell and backend system, and you set up your mailing list to automatically email these new offers to paying customers.
Since both groups of subscribers are in two different places in your sales funnel, it’s important that you are able to specifically target each group separately, as they will both be interested in different offers at different times.

Throw the right product out at the wrong time and your campaigns will suffer, but pushing the right product at the right time to the right buyer will guarantee success!
Those who have already purchased your core product will be interested in additional (relevant) offers, perhaps new versions or upgrades while your new subscribers who are still in the process of deciding to purchase your main product aren’t bothered with the same offers because they aren’t quite ready for them yet.
One way to easily segment your lists is by using built-in automated filters to move subscribers from one group to another. You can set the parameters based on many different things, including response rate, open rate, how long they’ve been a subscriber etc – and organize your contacts easily.

For example, in order to segment your lists, moving those who purchase your products to a “buyers list”, you can set up a secondary opt-in form on your products download page requesting that customers sign up to receive new updates, upgrades, or important emails regarding any changes to your product.

Customers who have invested money in your product are naturally going to subscribe to this list because they want to make sure that they get the most out of the product they paid for and that they aren’t missing out on important notices or critical updates.
Segmenting your lists will also help you improve your subscriber retention rates by helping you target each and every subscriber individually based on what they are most interested in, ensuring that your mailing list stays relevant to each group. Much better than having to send out one random broadcast to your entire mailing list, running the risk that you are promoting to a customer who has already purchased your product or is simply not interested in that particular promotion!
Know your audience through list segmentation and you’ll never struggle to make money in email marketing again!

Anthony

Anthony Aires is a speaker, information and software publisher, and a trainer. He has been an entrepreneur for more than half his life. He started leveraging the internet in 2002 by implementing SEO to generate leads for his real estate brokerage in Downtown Boston. Since then Anthony has gone on to create, launch, manage, and sell several internet businesses and brands while generating 7 figures in revenues. But he'll be the first to tell you he worked his ass off to get to where he is and it was a bumpy road having to declare bankruptcy twice in his life. You might not like the truth's he speaks, but at least you know you're always getting an honest answer!